Career
He once verbally attacked then-Prime Minister Harold Wilson live on air, over his support of United States President Lyndon Johnson over the Vietnam War. With producer David Webster, he made two notable programmes about the 1964 United States presidential election: A Choice or an Echo, about the differences between Lyndon Johnson and Barry Goldwater. And Thunder on the Left, about the Right-wingers surrounding Goldwater.
Generally recognised to be very handsome, he had a Canadian male lover called Louis Hanssen.
Hanssen was married to a woman and 8 years younger than Mossman. He died in 1968 of an accidental overdose.
He committed suicide in his cottage in Norfolk by taking a fatal overdose of barbiturates, leaving behind a note that read: “I can’t bear it any more, though I don’t know what ‘it’ is.”
Peter Shaffer, the author of the play Equus claimed that during a stay at the Norfolk cottage that Mossman, of whom he was a friend, told him the story on which he based the play. On 14 February 2007, The Reporter, a play by Nicholas Wright based on his book and directed by Richard Eyre premiered at the Royal National Theatre in London.
The play explores the social climate in the years before Mossman"s death as well as the reasons for the death itself.
